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accelerated Bodo’s resolution, though contemporary indignation
traced it to the direct agency of Satan.
843 The golden age of Franko-Jewish history continued
under Charles the Bald, son of Louis and Judith, who
numbered amongst his closest friends the Jewish physician
Zedekiah and another Jew called Judah. But the same causes
brought about similar effects. The favour shown to the Jews by
Louis’s successor excited the enmity of the pious, who found a
leader in Agobard’s successor and other bishops, and held several
councils with the object of inventing means for the curtailment of
imperial power, the exaltation of ecclesiastical authority, and the
suppression of the Jews. Again letters were addressed to the
Emperor, in which he was recommended to enforce towards the
murderers of Christ the measures which had been originated by
Constantine the Great and Theodosius the Younger, adopted by the
Spanish Visigoths and the Merovingian Kings of France, and
sanctioned by the unanimous intolerance of so many Synods in the
East and West. But these new enemies of the Jews proved no more
successful than their predecessors. Charles the Bald
877
contented himself with extorting one-tenth of their
earnings from the Jews, while his Christian subjects paid one-
eleventh. Thanks to their commercial enterprise and integrity the
“murderers of Christ” continued to prosper under the judicious
fleecing of the Carlovingians, until the partition of the empire into a
number of small states, the wane of the secular and the growth of
the spiritual power brought about a change.
899–914 Charles the Simple was induced by his love of God
and fear of the Pope to surrender all the lands and
vineyards of the Jews in the Duchy of Narbonne to the Church.
Boso, King of Burgundy and Provence, also made to the Church a
gift of the property of his Jewish subjects, and this cavalier treatment
of the wretched people continued under the first Capets, their
degradation keeping pace with the progress of Papal influence. So
deep was the suspicion now inspired by them, that when King Hugh
Capet died in 996 his Jewish physician was generally accused of
having murdered him.
 A parallel evolution took place in Germany. When
965
Otto the Great wished to show his piety by endowing
the newly-built church of Magdeburg, he did so by bestowing upon it
the revenue which he derived from the Jews. Likewise Otto II.,
sixteen years later, made an offering of the Jews of Merseburg to the
local bishops. At the beginning of the eleventh century there
occurred in Germany an event which may be regarded as the
prelude to the subsequent persecutions of Judaism.
1005
The chaplain of the Duke Conrad suddenly
scandalised the Christian world by going over to the Synagogue, and
exasperated the brethren whom he had forsaken by producing a
scurrilous lampoon on Christianity. The Emperor Henry caused to be
published a reply in every respect worthy of the apostate’s pamphlet.
Six years after the Jews were driven forth from Mayence, a decree
was issued ordering the Jews of various towns to be branded, that
they might not seek refuge in baptism, and so rigorous was the
persecution that a contemporary Jewish poet commemorates it in
lugubrious songs, wherein he expresses the fear that the children of
Israel might be forced to forget the faith of their fathers. But the
alarm was premature. Though, as a general rule, traffic in goods and
in money were the only callings left open to the Jews, in some of the
German states they still possessed the rights of citizenship and were
permitted to own real estate.
Thus the first period of the mediaeval drama came to a close, as
the second was opening.
 CHAPTER VII

THE CRUSADES

Towards the end of the eleventh century there arose in Europe a

gale of religious enthusiasm that boded no good to infidels. The
zealous temper which at an earlier period had found a congenial
pursuit in the extirpation of heathenism from Saxony, Lithuania,
Poland, and the Baltic provinces, and in the suppression of heresy
among the Vaudois, the Cathari or Albigenses, and others at a later,
was now to be diverted into a different channel. During the preceding
ages the authority of the Popes had been advancing with stealthy,
but undeviating and steady, strides. Their own industry, foresight,
and prudence laid the foundations of their political power; the piety
and the ignorance of the nations which recognised their spiritual rule
consolidated it. Every succeeding age found the Bishop of Rome in a
higher position than that occupied by his predecessors, until there
came one who was fitted to make use of the immense heritage of
authority bequeathed to him.
Gregory VII., surnamed Hildebrand, ascended St. Peter’s throne
in 1073. Though born in an obscure village and of humble
parentage, he was a person endowed by nature with all the qualities
necessary to make a successful master of men: strong and
ambitious, and possessed of an ideal, he was a stranger to fear as to
scruple. It was related of him that, whilst a lad in his father’s
workshop and ignorant of letters, he accidentally framed out of little
bits of wood the words: “His dominion shall be from one sea to the
other.” To his contemporaries the story was prophetic (we may be
content to regard it, true or not, as characteristic) of his career.
Gregory’s dream was to deliver the papacy from the secular
influence of the Emperor and to establish a theocratic Empire. This
was the guiding principle of his policy, and, though his plans were
flexible to circumstance, his purpose remained fixed. Like all great
men, Hildebrand knew that, where there is a strong will, all roads
lead to success. The first step to this end was the purification of the
Church of the corruption into which it had sunk under his depraved
predecessors, and the organisation of its soldiers under strict rules of
discipline. This was effected by the suppression of simony and the
enforcement of celibacy on the clergy. At the same time Gregory did
not neglect that which was the main object of his life: to make
Europe a vassal state to the pontifical see. The thunderbolts of
excommunication, which Gregory, the son of Bonic the carpenter,
wielded with Zeus-like majesty and impartiality, were freely hurled
against his enemies in the East and West. In the Emperor Henry IV.
the Pope met an adversary worthy of his heavenly artillery. But,
undismayed by Henry’s power, and unrestrained by considerations
of humanity, he plunged Christendom into that long-drawn strife
between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions which makes the history
of Europe for generations a melancholy tale of murder and outrage,
ending in a blood-stained triumph for St. Peter.
After having temporarily humbled Henry IV. and forced him in the
dead of winter to do penance in his shirt, the iron Pope turned his
weapons against the Jews. In 1078 he promulgated a canonical law
forbidding the hated people to hold any official post in Christendom,
and especially in Spain. Alfonso VI., King of Castile, two years later
received an Apostolic epistle congratulating him on his successes
over the Mohammedans, and admonishing him that “he must cease
to suffer the Jews to rule over the Christians, and to exercise
authority over them,” for such conduct, his Holiness affirmed, was
“the same as oppressing God’s Church and exalting Satan’s
Synagogue. To wish to please Christ’s enemies,” he added, “means
to treat Christ himself with contumely.” However, Alfonso was too
busy in the campaign against his own enemies to devote much
attention to the enemies of Christ—or of Gregory Hildebrand. None
the less, the letter marks an epoch. What hitherto was prejudice now
became law.
 In Germany also the Pope’s anti-Jewish decrees met with only
partial obedience. Bishop Rudiger of Speyer granted many privileges
to the Jews of his diocese. Their Chief Rabbi enjoyed the same
judicial authority over his own community as the burgomaster over
the Christian burgesses. The Jews were allowed to buy Christian
slaves and to defend themselves against the intrusion of the mob.
For all these boons they paid three and a half pounds of gold
annually. The Emperor Henry IV., Gregory’s antagonist, confirmed
and augmented these privileges. He forbade his subjects, under
severe penalties, to compel the Jews, or their slaves, to be baptized.
In litigation between Jews and Christians the Jewish law and form of
oath were to be followed; and the former were exempted from the
ordeals of fire and water. But in spite of these favours their lot was
such as to encourage Messianic expectations. The Redeemer, a
prince of the house of David, was confidently awaited about this time
(1096) to lead the chosen people back to the Holy Land. However,
fate had other things in store for them.
It was a time when the Eastern and Western halves of mankind
agreed in regarding the conversion, or, at least, the extermination of
each other as their divinely appointed task. If the followers of
Mohammed considered it an article of faith that the propagation of
Islam at all costs was the supreme duty of every true believer, the
propagation of the belief in the divinity of Christ, or the annihilation of
those who denied it, was not less firmly held by all good Christians
as a sacred obligation. A collision between the rival creeds was
inevitable. All that was wanting was union on the part of the
Christians equal to that which characterised the Mohammedans.
This consummation was prepared by Peter the Hermit and was
brought about by the exertions of the Pope.
1095 At the great Council of Clermont Urban II.
described to the noble crowd of prelates and barons,
assembled from all parts of Western Christendom, the sufferings of
the Eastern Christians at the hands of the Saracens. With burning
eloquence, and, no doubt, considerable exaggeration, he depicted
the dark deeds of “the enemies of God”: their destruction and
desecration of Christian churches; their slaughter, torture, and
forcible conversion of Christian men, and their violation of Christian
women; and he ended with a passionate appeal to all present to
hasten to the assistance of the Holy Land, “enslaved by the godless
and calling aloud to be delivered”; promising, at the same time, a
plenary indulgence and general remission of sins to all who should
enlist under the banner of the Cross. The effect of the Pontiff’s
harangue on his chivalrous, sinful, and bigoted hearers was
stupendous. It was the first official instigation to that hatred of the
non-European and non-Christian which, however loth we may be to
acknowledge the fact, in a less furious form, still survives amongst
us. Many obeyed the summons with fervour born of pure piety; many
more saw in the enterprise a comparatively cheap means of
obtaining pardon for all their crimes, past and to come; while others
welcomed an opportunity for satisfying their adventurous
dispositions, for gaining wealth and renown, or for quenching in the
blood of foreigners that fanatical zeal which could not find its full
gratification in the butchery of fellow-countrymen.
Among such foreigners—Asiatic at once and infidel—the nearest
were the Jews. Cruelty, like its opposite, begins at home. It was
natural that the champions of the Cross should begin the vindication
of their sacred emblem by the extermination of the race which had
made so criminal a use of it. The shadow of the Old Crime once
more fell upon the hapless people, and darkened their lives.
Religious frenzy kindled the ancient feud, and greed fanned it. The
vast and motley rabble of savage peasants who, under the
command of a monk and the guidance of a goat, followed in the
wake of the knightly army, incited by the lower clergy, fell upon the
Jewish colonies which lay along their route through Central Europe
—at Rouen, on the Moselle and the Rhine, at Verdun, Trèves,
Speyer, Metz, Cologne, Mayence, Worms, Strasburg—massacring,
pillaging, raping, and baptizing, without remorse or restraint.
But the Jews, as on so many occasions before and since, so
now proved in a practical and ghastly manner that they dreaded
death less than apostasy. Many of them met bigotry with bigotry, and
cheated their assailants of both glory and gain by committing their
property, their families and themselves to destruction. Martyrdom is a
pathetic yet forcible reply to oppression. At Trèves the Jews, on
hearing that the holy army was drawing near, were so terrified that
some of them killed their own children; matrons and maidens
drowned themselves in the Moselle in order to escape baptism or
disgrace; and the rest of the community vainly implored the hard-
hearted Bishop for protection. His answer was that nothing could
save them but conversion. Thereupon the wretches hastened to be
converted. The scene must have been a perfect study in the grimly
ludicrous. The enemy was outside ready to pounce upon his prey.
The latter said to the Bishop: “Tell us quickly what to believe.” The
Bishop recited the creed, and the converts repeated it after him with
all the fervour and fluency which the fear of death can only inspire.
At Speyer the Jews stoutly refused to be baptized, and many
were, therefore, massacred. Those who succeeded in escaping
sought shelter in the palace of the Bishop, who not only protected
them, but incurred the censures of his contemporaries by ordering
the execution of some of the holy murderers. A similar tragedy was
acted at Worms, where some of the victims were temporarily saved
by the Bishop, while a few were baptized, and the rest, men and
women, committed suicide. At Mayence, they were slaughtered in
the Archbishop’s palace, where they had taken refuge, and many
murdered each other rather than betray their faith. At Cologne the
majority of the community were rescued by the good burghers and
their humane Bishop Hermann III. The Emperor Henry IV, also, on
his return from his third Italian campaign, publicly denounced the
crimes of the Crusaders, instituted proceedings against the
Archbishop of Mayence, who had shared the spoils of the Jews, and
permitted the surviving converts to return to Judaism;
1097
thereby drawing down upon himself an indignant
reproof from his own antipope, Clement III., on whose behalf he had
undertaken that expedition to Italy. For, however grateful Clement
might be to Henry, he could not conscientiously connive at his
impious interference with the designs of Providence.
1146 Similar scenes were repeated at the Second
Crusade. Pope Eugenius III. issued a Bull, announcing
that all who joined in the Holy War would be released from the
interest which they owed to the Jewish money-lenders. St. Bernard
seconded the Pope’s recruiting efforts. Peter the Venerable, Abbot of
Clugny, exerted himself by might and main to inflame King Louis VII.
of France and other noble Crusaders against the Jews: “Of what use
is it,” wrote he to the king, “to go forth to seek the enemies of
Christendom in distant lands, if the blasphemous Jews, who are
much worse than the Saracens, are permitted in our very midst to
scoff with impunity at Christ and the Sacrament?... Yet, I do not
require you to put to death these accursed beings, because it is
written ‘Do not slay them.’ God does not wish to annihilate them, but
like Cain, the Fratricide, they must be made to suffer fearful
torments, and continue reserved for greater ignominy, and to an
existence more bitter than death.” In conformity with this charitable
doctrine, the Jews of France were forced to yield their ill-gotten gains
for the service of the cause of God.
Far worse was their fate in Germany. Even the partial protection
which the citizens of the Rhineland had afforded the persecuted
people in the First Crusade was now withdrawn, and the
undisciplined mob gave the reins to the gratification of its religious
zeal and of its lust. St. Bernard endeavoured to curb the demon of
fanaticism, which his own eloquence had raised, by admonishing the
enthusiasts, with more earnestness than consistency, that “the Jews
are not to be persecuted, not to be butchered.” But his well-meant
efforts produced no other effect than to turn the fury of the mob
against himself; for a rival monk, Rudolf, had been going up and
down the Rhineland, everywhere preaching, with tears in his eyes,
that all Jews who were found by the Crusaders should be slain as
“murderers of our dear Lord”—an appeal far more acceptable to the
brutal herd of besotted hinds to whom it was addressed. The
persecution commenced at Trèves, in August, 1146, where a Jew
was seized by the Crusaders, and, on refusing to be saved by
baptism, was murdered and mutilated. Soon afterwards a Jewess at
Speyer was tortured on the rack. Many others were waylaid and
made to suffer for their constancy at Würsburg and elsewhere. From
Germany the frenzy passed into France. At Carenton, Rameru, and
Sully the Jews were hunted and massacred.
 For one who, in the face of such deeds, strives to preserve his
faith in human nature, it is reassuring to note that the German
bishops exerted themselves on behalf of the miserable victims, and,
by accepting a simulated and temporary conversion, rescued many
from martyrdom. The Emperor also extended to them his protection.
But this favour was to cost the recipients dearly. Henceforth the
German Jews were regarded as the Emperor’s protégés, which
gradually came to mean the Emperor’s serfs. All they possessed,
including their families and their own persons, were the Emperor’s
chattels to be bought, sold, or pledged by him at pleasure. They
were designated “Chamber-servants” (Servi Camerae or
Kammerknechte); a servitude, however, that had the advantage of
making it the Emperor’s interest to safeguard them against
oppression, and to suffer no one to fleece them but himself.
And yet, such is the wonderful vitality of the race, the Jewish
traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the Jewry on the Rhine
only seventy years after the First, and twenty after the Second,
Crusade, describes these colonies as rich in money and culture and
hope; the brethren whom he found there as hospitable, cheerfully
alive, and awaiting the Messiah. This expectation had never been
entertained in vain. The wish had always yielded its own fulfilment.
About this time, it gave rise to David Alroy, another Redeemer
destined to delude the hapless nation for a while. He appeared in
Asia Minor, and summoned his brethren to his banner. Many gave up
all they possessed in order to respond to the call, and the
enthusiasm spread from Baghdad to East and West. But the
Messiah was excommunicated by the Synagogue, and murdered by
49
his own father-in-law while asleep. According to another version,
Alroy, when face to face with the Sultan, exclaimed: “Cut off my head
and I shall yet live.” He thus astutely exchanged prompt death for
lingering torture. Many Jews, however, continued to believe in him
for generations after his death.
The same spirit of religious mania which gave birth and
sustenance to the Crusades animated other movements, more
enduring in their results, if less romantic in their form. In 1198 the
throne of St. Peter was filled by Innocent III., a young and zealous
priest, fired with the lofty ambition to make Romanism the dominant
creed over East and West, and himself the autocrat of a united
Roman Catholic world. His genius was all but equal to this Titanic
task, and in a reign of eighteen years Innocent, favoured by the
convulsions and feuds which rent the whole of Europe, succeeded in
raising the Papacy to a pinnacle of power only dreamt of by his
predecessors, and attained by few of his successors. A worthy
spiritual descendant of Gregory VII., he made and unmade
Emperors and Kings at will, visiting the disobedience of princes upon
whole nations, or compelling them to submission by releasing their
subjects from their oath of allegiance. He exercised an absolute
sway over the conscience and the mind of contemporary
Christendom, and his pontificate was distinguished, in Gibbon’s
scathing phrase, by “the two most signal triumphs over sense and
humanity, the establishment of transubstantiation and the origin of
the Inquisition.” It was he, who by a rigorous interdict
1200
laid upon the Kingdom of France, compelled the
headstrong Philip Augustus to recall the wife whom he had
dismissed; who by the ban of excommunication forced
1208
John, King of England, to lay his crown at the feet of
his legate, and who by the execution of a like sentence
1211
against the Emperor Otho, John’s nephew, had
humbled that mighty and haughty monarch to the dust. It was under
his auspices that the Fifth Crusade was undertaken,
1203
and it was with his connivance that the forces,
ostensibly recruited for the deliverance of the holy Sepulchre from
the infidels, were employed to subjugate the Christian Empire of the
East, and thus to pave the way for the advent of the Turk.
However, these and many other triumphs notwithstanding,
Innocent’s dream of world-wide dominion could not be fully realised
while such a thing as individual conscience remained in the world,
and individual conscience could not be abolished without
persecution. Innocent was too great a despot to shrink from the
difficulties of the work; too sincere a Catholic to show any pity to
unbelief. The thirteenth century opened under evil omens for
dissenters. Immediately on his accession Innocent had demanded
the suppression of the Albigenses of Southern France, those
unfortunate forerunners of the Reformation, because they, choosing
to follow the dictates of their own conscience, refused to conform to
the practices of the Church and to comply with the commands of her
clergy. Raymund VI., Count of Toulouse, however,
1207
declined to consider the massacre of his subjects one
of his duties as a sovereign, and was excommunicated. In the
following year the Pope, seizing the pretext offered by the murder of
his legate, proclaimed an unholy war against the heretics. And so
great was the Pope’s power over the superstitious and unscrupulous
world of mediaeval Europe, that thousands volunteered to carry out
the Pontiff’s atrocious orders. Raymund, who alone among the
Christian princes had ventured to raise his voice in defence of the
persecuted, had meanwhile been stripped of his dominions, dragged
naked into the Church, scourged by the Pope’s legate, and was now
forced to lead the crusade against his own people. The harmless
population was almost exterminated by the most barbarous means,
their heresy was all but quenched in blood; and one of the most
prosperous and civilised provinces of Europe was laid waste. The
ferocity of the soldiers was eclipsed by that of the monks and priests,
great numbers of whom swelled the ranks of the butchers. On the
22nd of July, 1209, the city of Beziers was taken by storm. The
Abbot Arnold, being asked how the heretics were to be distinguished
from true believers, replied, “Slay all; God will know his own.” “We
spared,” said the same monk in his report to the Pope, “no dignity,
no sex, no age; nearly twenty thousand human beings have perished
by the sword. After that great massacre the town was plundered and
burnt, and the revenge of God seemed to rage upon it in a wonderful
manner.”
So fared European heretics within the Church. Infidels of alien
blood could hardly expect better treatment. The popular notion that
the dispersion and sufferings of the Jews were a divine punishment
for the crucifixion of Christ was raised by Innocent to the dignity of a
dogma. It followed as a logical corollary that it was the sacred duty of
Christ’s Vicar on earth to make the culprits feel the full rigour of the
sentence. After the fashion of fanatics, Innocent mistook his own
intolerance for holy enthusiasm, and, while indulging his own hatred,
he imagined that he was only hating the enemies of Heaven. It was
also currently believed that the example and the teaching of the
Jews tended to pervert their Christian neighbours, and to encourage
protest and heresy. The Albigensian sect in France, already
mentioned, like the Hussite reform movement in Bohemia two
centuries later, was attributed to Jewish influence. For both these
reasons, their own infidelity and their tendency to foster infidelity in
others, the Jews ought to be crushed.
The times were propitious. In 1167 the assassination of
Raymund, Viscount of Beziers, had deprived the Jews of their
protector. His successor Roger, who favoured the
1170
Albigensian heretics, had Jewish sheriffs; but his
partiality to these two classes of enemies of Catholicism had
provoked the wrath of the Pope and led to the prince’s tragic death.
At Montpellier William VIII. and his sons excluded the Jews from the
office of Sheriff. But these restrictions were not
1178–1201
sufficient. Innocent began the attack methodically in
1205, when he wrote to Philip Augustus, King of France, complaining
of the usurious extortions of the Jews in that country, of their being
allowed to employ Christian servants and nurses, and of the fact that
Christians were not admitted to depose against Jews—things which
were contrary to the resolution of the Third Lateran Council held
under Pope Alexander III. Moreover, Innocent
1179
complained that the Jewish community of Sens had
built a new synagogue which rose to a greater height than the
neighbouring Christian church, and disturbed the service in the latter
by loud and insolent chanting; that they scoffed at Christianity, and
that they murdered Christians; and he ended by exhorting Philip
Augustus to oppress the enemies of Christ. A similar epistle was
addressed to Alfonso, King of Castile, threatening him with St.
Peter’s displeasure, should he continue to allow the Synagogue to
thrive at the expense of the Church. Three years later a pastoral
epistle to the same effect was sent to the Count of Nevers, urging
him to coerce the Jews and condemn them to serfdom, for they, “like
the fratricide Cain, are doomed to wander about the earth as
fugitives and vagabonds, and their faces must be covered with
insult.” The writer further pointed out that it is disgraceful for
Christian princes to receive Jews into their towns and villages, to
employ them as usurers in order to extort money from the Christians,
and to allow them to press wine which was used in the Lord’s
Supper.
1209 All the above exhortations were systematised by
the Council of Avignon. By the Statutes then passed
the Jews were officially pronounced as polluted and polluting. It was
decreed that “Jews and harlots should not dare to touch with their
50
hands bread or fruits exposed for sale.” The old Church law which
forbade the Jews to employ Christian servants was renewed and
enforced. The faithful were warned neither to receive services from
Jews nor to render services to them, but to avoid them as a pest. All
who had any dealings with Jews who transgressed these decrees
were threatened with excommunication. Raymund of Toulouse, the
protector of the Albigensian heretics and friend of the Jews, and all
the barons of free cities, were bound by oath to carry out the
decisions of the Council.
1211 Once more oppression from without fanned the
longing for Redemption in the hearts of the Jews. The
yearning after Zion, invigorated by Jehuda Halevi’s poetry, impelled
more than three hundred Rabbis of France and England to emigrate
to the Holy Land, where they visited the spots hallowed by the spirits
of the past, wept over the ruins of their departed glory, and built
synagogues and schools in order to keep alive the memory and the
hope of a better day.
Meanwhile the Pope did not allow the iron to cool. In 1215 a
great Œcumenical Council was convoked in Rome, under his
presidency, to complete the ruin of the Albigenses, to stimulate the
Crusades against the Saracens of Spain and Palestine, and,
generally, to promote the kingdom of God on earth. The Jews,
knowing from experience that any measures taken to that end could
not fail to redound to their detriment, hastened to send deputies to
Rome, in order to ward off the blow. But their endeavours proved
fruitless. Four out of the seventy canonical decrees passed by the
Council referred to them. The King of France, the Duke of Burgundy,
and all other princes were called upon to lend their help in reducing
the doomed people in their respective dominions to that state of
bondage which was ordained for it by the divine will, as interpreted
by theological bigotry. The Pope’s order met with general obedience.
In most European countries the Jews were forbidden to hold any
public appointment of trust, or to show themselves in the streets at
Easter. They were obliged to pay tithes to the Church that
persecuted them, and the head of each Jewish family was forced to
subscribe an annual sum at the Easter festival. They were compelled
by heavy fines and penalties to wear a yellow badge of distinction,
which in their case meant a badge of shame, and the Christians
were exhorted by their pastors not to allow their homes or their
shops to be defiled by the presence of Heaven’s enemies.
However, papal decrees and anathemas notwithstanding, self-
interest might have prevailed over religious fanaticism, and the
sovereigns who had hitherto sold their connivance to the Jews might
have continued to shield them. In fact, the Duke of Toulouse and the
barons, despite the oath which they had been obliged to take,
continued to invest the Jews with public dignities, and in Spain the
Pope’s commands were strenuously ignored. But there now came
into being a power of persecution, even more formidable than
Papacy itself. The pan-Catholic enthusiasm, which had inspired
Innocent’s anti-Jewish policy was bequeathed to two bodies of
apostles, through whose organised zeal it was destined to spread far
and wide, and, like a poisonous breath, to blight many a noble flower
in the bud. The age of stationary and corpulent monks was
succeeded by the age of lean and wandering friars. A
1223
few years after Innocent’s death were instituted the
Order of Dominic and the Order of Francis, the precursors of the
stakes and scaffolds of the Inquisition. The latter order had been
called into existence with the special object of stamping out the
Albigensian heresy. But an essential part of the mission of both
bodies was to hunt out dissent, to root out free-thought, and to
realise the bigot’s ideal of spiritual peace by means of intellectual
starvation. Uniformity was their idol, and to that idol they were
prepared to sacrifice the moral sense of mankind and the lives of
their fellow-creatures. The Jews supplied them with a splendid field
for the exercise of their missionary ardour: numerous, obstinate, rich
and unpopular, they offered a prey as tempting as it was safe. The
friars were in some ways an undoubted power for good; but the Jews
experienced none of this better side of their activity.
In 1227 a Council at Narbonne confirmed the canonical
ordinances against the Jews, and many ancient decrees of the
Merovingian kings were revived. Not only were the Jews forbidden to
take interest on money and compelled to wear the badge and to pay
taxes to the Church, but they were again prohibited from stirring
abroad during Easter. Shortly afterwards two other
1231
Councils at Rouen and Tours re-enacted and enlarged
the anti-Jewish statutes of the Council of Rome.
But the Dominicans were as subtle as they were zealous. They
felt that the citadel of Judaism which had held out for so many
centuries, could not be carried by storm. They resorted to less crude
tactics. With a patience, perseverance, and ingenuity worthy of their
high ambition, they devoted themselves to the study of the Hebrew
language and literature, their Master Raymund de Peñaforte
prevailing upon the Kings of Aragon and Castile to found special
colleges for the purpose. The Prophets of the Old Testament had
already supplied the apologists of the Church with proofs of the truth
51
of Christianity. The Talmud was now to supply them with fresh
proofs of the falsity of Judaism. From the pages of that marvellous
compilation of noble thoughts and multifarious absurdity, they culled
everything that was likely to reflect discredit on the morality or the
intelligence of their adversaries. In this campaign the Dominicans
were fortunate enough to enlist the services of renegade Jews, who,
after the fashion of renegades, strove to prove their loyalty to the
faith they embraced by a bitter persecution of the one they deserted.
One of these apostates, Nicolas Donin by name, in 1239 submitted
to Pope Gregory IX. a minute indictment of the pernicious book, and
induced him to issue Bulls to the Kings of England, Spain, and
France, as well as to the bishops in those countries, ordering a
general confiscation of the Talmud, and a public enquiry into the
charges brought against its contents. The Pope’s instructions, so far
as we know, appear to have produced no impression in the first two
kingdoms, but in France there reigned Louis IX., known to fame as
St. Louis: in mundane affairs a brave, high-minded, just and humane
prince; but not far in advance of his age in things celestial. In fact, he
possessed all the prejudices of an ordinary mediaeval knight, and
more than the superstition of an ordinary mediaeval monk. He was
sincerely convinced that the road to heaven lay through Jerusalem.
Acting on this conviction, he led the last two Crusades, and laid
down his life in the cause of Catholicism; a sacrifice which earned
him a place among the saints of the Church. Such a prince could
not, without flagrant inconsistency, ignore the Pontiff’s wishes. He,
therefore, ordered that a careful search for the suspected book
should be made throughout his dominions, that all copies should be
seized, and that a public disputation should be held, in which four
Rabbis were to take up the challenge thrown down by Donin.
The antagonists met in the precincts of the Court, and a brilliant
assembly of secular and spiritual magnates formed the audience.
Donin warmly denounced the Talmud as a farrago of blasphemy,
slander, superstition, immorality and folly, and the Rabbis defended it
as warmly as they dared. The debate, though distinguished by all the
scurrility and more than all the ferocity of a village prize-fight, seems
to have been conducted on the principle that whichever side had the
best of the argument, the Christian should win; and the Court of
Inquisitors returned a verdict accordingly. The Talmud was found
guilty of all the charges brought against it and was sentenced to the
flames. Execution was delayed for two years through bribery; but it
was carried out in 1242. Fourteen—some say four and twenty—
cartloads of Rabbinical lore and legislation fed the bonfire. The grief
of the French Jews at the loss of their sacred books was bitter, and
the most pious amongst them kept the anniversary of the cremation
52
as a day of fasting.
1263 Twenty-one years later a similar tourney took place
in Barcelona by order, and in the presence, of Jayme
I., King of Aragon. Don Jayme had borrowed from his northern
neighbours the axiom that the Jews were to be treated as royal
chattels. Moreover, his conscience was in the keeping of Raymund
de Peñaforte, the Master of the Dominicans, a great Inquisitor born
before his time. King Jayme had led an amorous and not immaculate
youth. He was, therefore, in his old age, peculiarly susceptible to his
Confessor’s admonitions. The sins of love should be atoned for by
acts of persecution. The religious freedom of the Jews should be
offered up as a sacrifice of expiation. It was the logic and the
morality of the Middle Ages.
The outcome of Jayme’s remorse was a theological contest at
the royal court of Barcelona. There again the lists were held for
Christianity by a Dominican friar of Jewish antecedents, while the
champion of Judaism was Nachmanides, famed in the annals of
Israel as the greatest philosopher, physician, theologian, and
controversialist of his age. Pablo Christiani politely endeavoured to
prove that the prophets of the Jews had predicted the advent and
recognised the divinity of Jesus. Nachmanides with equal politeness
denied that they had done anything of the kind. After five days’
refined recrimination the Court unanimously pronounced in favour of
Christianity. The books of the Jews were expurgated of all “anti-
Christian” passages, Nachmanides’s account of the controversy was
burnt publicly as blasphemous, and the author, then in his seventieth
year, banished from Spain, ended his days in Jerusalem. Pablo,
whose ambition was kindled by victory, undertook a tour through the
Iberian Peninsula and Provence, and, armed with a royal edict,
compelled the Jews to engage in religious controversies with him
and to defray the expenses of his missionary journeys.
Missions to the Jews became the fashion of the day, and the
kingdoms of the West were overrun by itinerant dialecticians seeking
whom they might convert. The Jews were forced to attend church
and to listen to sermons against their own religion. Thanks to their
long training in Rabbinical subtleties, the benighted people
sometimes proved more than a match for their assailants, and, if fair
play were not contrary to the laws of ecclesiastical warfare, they
might succeed in converting the would-be convertors. But, though
religious discussion was invited, nay, forced by the Church, it was
always on the clear understanding that the Christians might beat the
Jews, but that the Jews should under no circumstances be allowed
to beat the Christians. To prevent any misconception on the subject,
Thomas Aquinas, justly celebrated as one of the least bigoted of
theologians, and distinguished among schoolmen for his tolerance of
Judaism, gravely cautioned his readers to have no intercourse with
the Jews, unless they felt sure that their faith was proof against
reason.
In later years the work of conversion in the various countries was
entrusted by the Popes to Dominican friars and inquisitors, who
carried it on with a diligence never practised except by men
fanatically believing in the truth of their doctrines and with a
ruthlessness only possible in men too firmly persuaded of the
holiness of the end to be scrupulous about the means. These
apostles were authorised to reinforce the powers of their eloquence
by an appeal to the secular arm. Even so modern missionaries in
China have been known in time of peril to forget that an apostle
should be above earthly weapons and “to clamour for a gunboat with
53
which to ensure respect for the Gospel.”
And while disappointed theologians represented the Jew’s
loyalty to his religion as a proof of his anti-Christian tendencies,
scholars represented his aloofness as a proof of his anti-social
nature, and they both agreed in denouncing him as “an enemy of
mankind.” This lesson, to use the words of a distinguished Jewish
writer, “was dinned into the ears of the masses until the calumny
became part of the popular creed. The poets formulated the idea for
54
the gentry, the friars brought it to the folk.”
The animosity thus fomented against the Jews found frequent
opportunities of translating itself into acts of horror. In France, after
the war declared against the unfortunate people by the Church, they
lost the royal protection which they had enjoyed hitherto, and were
henceforth exposed not only to the spasmodic fury of the populace,
but also to systematic persecution on the part of bishops, barons and
towns. Bishop Odo of Paris, in 1197, forbade the Christians to have
1236
any dealings, social or commercial, with the Jews. The
Crusaders called to arms by Gregory IX. attacked the
Jewish communities of Anjou, Poitou, Bordeaux, Angoulème, and
elsewhere, and on the Jews refusing to be baptized, the holy
warriors trampled many of them, men, women and children, to death
under the hoofs of their horses, burned their synagogues, and
pillaged and sacked their private dwellings. St. Louis encouraged the
conversion of the Jews, permitting the children of baptized fathers to
be torn away from their unregenerate mothers. By a
1246
decree of the Council of Beziers the disabilities of the
Jews were once more confirmed, and the Christians were now
forbidden to call in Jewish doctors, thus depriving the Jews of the
profession which they had hitherto almost monopolised in Europe. A
few years after Pope Alexander IV., who had just
1257
established the Inquisition in France at the request of
St. Louis, issued another Bull in which the ruler of that kingdom and
other princes were again exhorted to enforce the distinctive garb
upon the Jews and to burn all copies of the Talmud. To omit minor
acts of oppression, the fanatical sect of the “Shepherds,” following
the example of the Crusaders, massacred the Jews on the Garonne
in 1320.
In Germany the sufferings of Israel were equally
1218–1250
severe. The Emperor Frederick II., despite his infidelity
and his enmity towards the Papacy, adopted the Pope’s anti-Jewish
decrees. He excluded the Jews from public offices, he censured the
Archduke of Austria for tolerating and protecting them, he enforced
the use of the badge in his Italian and Sicilian dominions, and he
oppressed them with heavy taxes, dwelling with especial satisfaction
on the dictum that the Jews were the Emperor’s serfs. In the
troublous period which followed Frederick’s death the Jews were
slain and burnt in great numbers at Weissenberg, Magdeburg, and
Erfurt, while other cities year after year witnessed wholesale
slaughter, and “Jew-roaster” became a coveted title of honour. In
addition to occasional massacre, from the end of the twelfth to the
middle of the fifteenth century the German Jews underwent eight
expulsions and confiscations of their communal property: Vienna
(1196), Mecklenburg (1225), Frankfort (1241), Brandenburg (1243),
Nuremberg (1390), Prague (1391), Heidelberg (1391), and Ratisbon
(1476).
In Switzerland the persecution commenced about the middle of
the fourteenth century, and several expulsions are recorded in the
ensuing century. In Eastern Europe the Jews suffered in Russia and
Hungary. The semi-civilised and semi-Christianized Magyars, who
had hitherto tolerated the Jews, were incited to acts of oppression by
the Western friars. Poland and Lithuania were the only European
countries where the Jews of the later Middle Ages found shelter, and
consequently both those countries received large numbers of
fugitives from the Western fields of carnage.
Credulity joined hands with bigotry. No story told of the Jews was
too extravagant for belief; no charge brought against them too trivial
for repetition, provided it afforded an excuse for persecution. Some
of the odious crimes attributed by the heathens in the early centuries
to the Christians, as a justification of their suppression, were now
revived by the Christians against the Jews. The latter were accused
of enveigling Christian children into their houses and sacrificing them
for ritual or medicinal purposes, of travestying the sacraments of the
Church, of poisoning wells and of committing all kinds of
abominations, which plainly rendered their utter extermination a
public duty. Similar charges, curiously enough, are still brought
against the Jews by the Christians of Eastern Europe, by the Jews
themselves against Hebrew converts to Islam in Turkey, and by the
Chinese against Protestant missionaries—“charges of gross
personal immorality and of kidnapping and mutilation of children,
which, however monstrous and malevolent, are not the less, but the
more serious, because they are firmly believed by the ignorant
55
audiences to whom they are addressed.” To the vulgar all that is
strange is sinister.
The free propagation of these heinous and disgusting myths
among the vulgar masses of mediaeval Europe led, as it had done in
ancient times and as it has done more recently, to a horrible
persecution of those against whom they were levelled.
1171
The Jews were ruthlessly burnt by order of Duke
Theobalt at Blois, were massacred by the populace in Languedoc
1321
and Central France, and on the plague breaking out in
the following year, they were burnt en masse—men,
women and children. A season of alternate persecution and
toleration ensued, until they were banished from Central France and